Revert to the old ad system

[Diz]

This new credit system is awful and I can't think of a way to make it work. You either appeal to your lower budget buyers and give massive discounts to your higher budget buyers, or you do what you do now and screw over the lower budget buyers.

This new advertising system is absolute garbage for anyone not named Mick. Even the largest companies advertising on mcm like PebbleHost are losing a significant discount and having to pay significantly more to get that lesser discount.

It's no secret I buy plugin stickies, I have thought raising the prices from $3.50/week to $15/week was rough because before I bought them they were never kept. Sadly I couldn't do much. I went from paying $19 every two months to $84 every two months, that's a significant increase. (~ 450% increase) This is nothing in comparison to what Mick would do next to grab more money without growing the site.

Behold Micks latest money grab, the amazing credit system! Advertised in announcements as a discounted way of advertising when it is nothing like that. Yes, Mick now offers a 5% discount for crypto payments which wasn't a thing before, lets give him credit! Now, we went from getting discounts for buying additional weeks. That % maxed out at a 40% discount, now the max discount you can get is 35%. Not a big deal right? it wouldn't be except you now have to pay a minimum of $7,000 and use crypto to achieve that 35% discount.

I used to get a 30% discount, to get that same discount using the same payment methods I have been for years I would need to spend $7,000 compared to $84 that's an increase of 8335%. So I have gone through the 450% increase in weekly costs for my ads now I need to pay Mick 8335% more to get my same 30% discount. Even at the ridiculous rates, Mick is charging for his dying unadvertised site I wouldn't use all my credits for over 2 years. That's advertising four threads @ $15 for 52 weeks. So now not only am I forced to send 8335% more money to Mick I have to trust that he is going to keep this site alive for 2+ years.

I have talked to others and I have yet to find anyone who thinks this new system is good. I would love to hear what others think.

I would just like to say the last time mcm did something like this was when they added the reputation system in replacement of the vouch system and to this day there are still many issues and complaints around it. Why do another when everyone was okay with the way it was and Mick was making great money.

 

[Mick]

Howdy everyone, we completely understand everyone’s concerns with the way in which we rolled out this new system and I’ll try to address everything here.

First and foremost, I just want to assure all advertisers that it is always in our best interest to keep you happy with the site and we’ll always try to make the process of buying advertisements on MC-Market fair and easy to understand. We take all input very seriously.

You’re absolutely right in this suggestion and I apologise for the poor implementation of the Credits system for advertisers which I’ll explain later in this post. To remedy this situation, we have made the following changes:

1. Reinstated the previous bulk discounts given on advertisement invoice payments
2. Removed the bulk discounts given on Credit purchases. $1 USD will always be $1 Credit (unless paying with crypto when we’ll still give 5% off)
3. Provided full compensation to all users who have purchased ads in bulk without receiving the discount. Please check your transaction log and if you believe you didn’t receive the appropriate amount please create a ticket.

Recently we went through and made relatively significant reductions in ad prices in an attempt to fix these problems which didn’t work. We won’t be removing these price reductions, and thus almost every advertiser should see a decrease in ad prices. We’ll continue to adjust prices based on supply and demand once everything has settled back to normal in a few weeks.

Where we went wrong
XenForo addons are very difficult to develop, especially on our current version. The implementation of Credits was a deceptively difficult job with all of the fringe cases we had to account for. Credits had been planned, discussed internally, and developed for over 6 months before implementation. During that time we were focusing on the features and functionality and I essentially overlooked the bulk discounts because I assumed that the higher bulk discount tiers were justified by the fact that once you had credits you’d not have to spend them all at once. I didn’t take the time to calculate the influence that this would have on our advertisers and thus we’ve now changed the system to work in a way I’m confident everyone will be happy with.

We tried to remedy this by decreasing the prices of the most expensive sticky thread forums but this didn’t work well either and especially didn’t help smaller advertisers. We’re keeping these price decreases with the changes we’ve made today.

Benefits of the Credits system
Despite everything said above, I still firmly believe that the Credits system is beneficial to both MC-Market and our advertisers, it was purely the bulk discounts that caused problems. The benefits of Credits are as follows.

Support is far easier for us to give. Previously whenever a user was having problems with paying for their invoice due to their card not working properly or when we had to compensate users it was a huge pain in the ass involving coupon codes. Another reason this is easier is when generating invoices for our larger advertisers for tax purposes it’s far better.

Account upgrades are now way better. Previously it was a pretty bad system that was unintuitive for our new users but now it’s easier to use, better for gifting, and especially for our Ultimate users to be able to extend their upgrade while it’s still ongoing.

Full VAT/GST compliance. Through our partnership with FastSpring they provide us with a really simple and secure system of handling our local tax obligations.

More payment methods. Now advertisers can pay with more than just cards and crypto. PayPal, Amazon Pay, GiroPay, WePay, Wire transfer, and even physical cheques are accepted. Basically any way you could want to pay we accept now, reducing friction for advertisers.

The Credits system will be vital for our plans in our XenForo 2 migration because we intend on entirely redeveloping our ads manager from scratch. It’s inevitable that we’ll need Credits anyways, and introducing it on XF1 has allowed us to give all these benefits. Speaking of which, there’s been some concern about our new system because it hasn’t been explained very well, so I’ll explain how our new system will work here:

Explanation of the XF2 system
There’s been some confusion about what the new ads system we’ve alluded to a few times will have in it and some hesitancy with the bidding aspect of it in particular. Our current Ads Manager is an off-the-shelf addon with a handful of custom additions to it, but in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community.

When planning our new system, we saw two fundamental flaws that we knew needed to be fixed; the horrible queue process and ad prices not being balanced well.

The solution to both of these problems (as well as many other minor problems) is to switch from a set price for each forum, category, and position to instead an auction and bidding system. Rather than paying per week, the auctions will be done on a daily basis and ads will display in order of bids. Each auction will have a minimum that you must exceed (a bit below what the stickies currently cost in each forum) and the top 5 bidders will be shown on the site for that day.

Importantly, you don’t need to go back to the auction to re-bid every single day. When you set your bid you can optionally set a budget and your ad will simply keep displaying every day until either your budget is hit, you run out of Credits, you’re banned, or you deactivate your ad.

If you want to sticky a new thread you no longer will have to wait for weeks, months, or even years in some cases for the existing advertisers to hopefully stop paying. You just need to outbid one of the existing advertisers. If you’re outbid your ad will not display until you increase your bid or an advertiser above you reduces their bid.

Another thing we’re particularly excited about in our new system is far more powerful analytics for advertisers. Currently, only banner advertisements can see impressions and clicks, but with our new system, we’ll be bringing this functionality to all forms of advertisements. Now you’ll easily be able to see how effective your sticky thread is through charts of impressions and clicks per day and month.

This new system completely removes the concept of ad invoices entirely since ads will be paid for by deducting Credits from your balance each day automatically rather than a potentially large upfront payment. When we’re on XF2 we’ll switch our discounts back from being given on each invoice to instead being given on Credit purchases just as they previously were (with discounts of up to 40% if buying $7,000+ at a time).

You may be wondering, what happens to my current advertisement I have active when the new system arrives? You’ll receive the full value of any unused time on your ad in the form of Credits and you’ll be able to enter auctions to continue advertising any threads, resources, or banners. For example, if you paid a $100 invoice for 10 weeks of a thread sticky but 5 weeks into it we switch to XF2, you’d receive $50 Credits back in your account.

If anyone has any concerns or questions with this system please let us know. Development for this new system is complete and we’re just putting the final touches on and testing it now but if you have any other concerns it isn’t too late for us to make minor adjustments to the system.

 

[MrAniman2]

So, if I understand it correctly... there will be a minimum set price you must pay for sticky (pretty much the same current sticky price) but with an extra option for someone who is crazy enough or a fool to pay an unlimited amount... I suspect the only winner in this situation will be you Mick. This sounds much like those cash-grab "voting sites" with bids up to 10k usd for top spots (Although I cannot deny I am a bit curious to see how it would play out.)

Like it was pointed above, the main problem is that advertising has become unreasonably and, I would say, ridiculously expensive for even less traffic as Dann pointed out.

You Mick claim to care about advertisers but:
- Have you done any market research? Do you have any idea how much money does advertising spots on Mc-Market bring in to advertisers?
- Have you considered how much money does the artist/advertiser has left after paying the expenses (tax and Mc-Market adv. fee)? Or is this question not concerning you?

In the ideal case advertising options should be available to everyone at any time but if you take the man's last shirt for it you cannot claim you care about him...

P.S. I somewhat suspect both of these questons will go unnoticed...

 

[Dann]

Like it was pointed above, the main problem is that advertising has become unreasonably and, I would say, ridiculously expensive for even less traffic as Dann pointed out.

I personally actually don't mind the auctions - provided the minimum price is far lower than the current pricing (or at least a decent amount lower than the current pricing). At the moment the price for the banner we have has only increased whilst the site traffic has decreased... even with the slight decrease that has been applied just now.

The entire point is to have the price at an equilibrium between supply and demand, which is a good thing.

Although if the base price is going to be the current pricing on ads then it's totally pointless and I see zero reasons as an advertiser to wish to move to the new system, but hey only time will tell.

EDIT:

That being said - It would be nice to see Mick have the auctions based on an eBay style system where you only pay slightly more than the other highest bidder (so say I bid $5/day but the next highest bidder is only $1.50/day, I'd only pay $1.60/day.

 

[Jasmine]

Howdy everyone, we completely understand everyone’s concerns with the way in which we rolled out this new system and I’ll try to address everything here.

First and foremost, I just want to assure all advertisers that it is always in our best interest to keep you happy with the site and we’ll always try to make the process of buying advertisements on MC-Market fair and easy to understand. We take all input very seriously.

You’re absolutely right in this suggestion and I apologise for the poor implementation of the Credits system for advertisers which I’ll explain later in this post. To remedy this situation, we have made the following changes:

1. Reinstated the previous bulk discounts given on advertisement invoice payments
2. Removed the bulk discounts given on Credit purchases. $1 USD will always be $1 Credit (unless paying with crypto when we’ll still give 5% off)
3. Provided full compensation to all users who have purchased ads in bulk without receiving the discount. Please check your transaction log and if you believe you didn’t receive the appropriate amount please create a ticket.

Recently we went through and made relatively significant reductions in ad prices in an attempt to fix these problems which didn’t work. We won’t be removing these price reductions, and thus almost every advertiser should see a decrease in ad prices. We’ll continue to adjust prices based on supply and demand once everything has settled back to normal in a few weeks.

Where we went wrong
XenForo addons are very difficult to develop, especially on our current version. The implementation of Credits was a deceptively difficult job with all of the fringe cases we had to account for. Credits had been planned, discussed internally, and developed for over 6 months before implementation. During that time we were focusing on the features and functionality and I essentially overlooked the bulk discounts because I assumed that the higher bulk discount tiers were justified by the fact that once you had credits you’d not have to spend them all at once. I didn’t take the time to calculate the influence that this would have on our advertisers and thus we’ve now changed the system to work in a way I’m confident everyone will be happy with.

We tried to remedy this by decreasing the prices of the most expensive sticky thread forums but this didn’t work well either and especially didn’t help smaller advertisers. We’re keeping these price decreases with the changes we’ve made today.

Benefits of the Credits system
Despite everything said above, I still firmly believe that the Credits system is beneficial to both MC-Market and our advertisers, it was purely the bulk discounts that caused problems. The benefits of Credits are as follows.

Support is far easier for us to give. Previously whenever a user was having problems with paying for their invoice due to their card not working properly or when we had to compensate users it was a huge pain in the ass involving coupon codes. Another reason this is easier is when generating invoices for our larger advertisers for tax purposes it’s far better.

Account upgrades are now way better. Previously it was a pretty bad system that was unintuitive for our new users but now it’s easier to use, better for gifting, and especially for our Ultimate users to be able to extend their upgrade while it’s still ongoing.

Full VAT/GST compliance. Through our partnership with FastSpring they provide us with a really simple and secure system of handling our local tax obligations.

More payment methods. Now advertisers can pay with more than just cards and crypto. PayPal, Amazon Pay, GiroPay, WePay, Wire transfer, and even physical cheques are accepted. Basically any way you could want to pay we accept now, reducing friction for advertisers.

The Credits system will be vital for our plans in our XenForo 2 migration because we intend on entirely redeveloping our ads manager from scratch. It’s inevitable that we’ll need Credits anyways, and introducing it on XF1 has allowed us to give all these benefits. Speaking of which, there’s been some concern about our new system because it hasn’t been explained very well, so I’ll explain how our new system will work here:

Explanation of the XF2 system
There’s been some confusion about what the new ads system we’ve alluded to a few times will have in it and some hesitancy with the bidding aspect of it in particular. Our current Ads Manager is an off-the-shelf addon with a handful of custom additions to it, but in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community.

When planning our new system, we saw two fundamental flaws that we knew needed to be fixed; the horrible queue process and ad prices not being balanced well.

The solution to both of these problems (as well as many other minor problems) is to switch from a set price for each forum, category, and position to instead an auction and bidding system. Rather than paying per week, the auctions will be done on a daily basis and ads will display in order of bids. Each auction will have a minimum that you must exceed (a bit below what the stickies currently cost in each forum) and the top 5 bidders will be shown on the site for that day.

Importantly, you don’t need to go back to the auction to re-bid every single day. When you set your bid you can optionally set a budget and your ad will simply keep displaying every day until either your budget is hit, you run out of Credits, you’re banned, or you deactivate your ad.

If you want to sticky a new thread you no longer will have to wait for weeks, months, or even years in some cases for the existing advertisers to hopefully stop paying. You just need to outbid one of the existing advertisers. If you’re outbid your ad will not display until you increase your bid or an advertiser above you reduces their bid.

Another thing we’re particularly excited about in our new system is far more powerful analytics for advertisers. Currently, only banner advertisements can see impressions and clicks, but with our new system, we’ll be bringing this functionality to all forms of advertisements. Now you’ll easily be able to see how effective your sticky thread is through charts of impressions and clicks per day and month.

This new system completely removes the concept of ad invoices entirely since ads will be paid for by deducting Credits from your balance each day automatically rather than a potentially large upfront payment. When we’re on XF2 we’ll switch our discounts back from being given on each invoice to instead being given on Credit purchases just as they previously were (with discounts of up to 40% if buying $7,000+ at a time).

You may be wondering, what happens to my current advertisement I have active when the new system arrives? You’ll receive the full value of any unused time on your ad in the form of Credits and you’ll be able to enter auctions to continue advertising any threads, resources, or banners. For example, if you paid a $100 invoice for 10 weeks of a thread sticky but 5 weeks into it we switch to XF2, you’d receive $50 Credits back in your account.

If anyone has any concerns or questions with this system please let us know. Development for this new system is complete and we’re just putting the final touches on and testing it now but if you have any other concerns it isn’t too late for us to make minor adjustments to the system.

Thank you for listening to all of us. Specially the ones who were greatly affected by this change and reversing it with the changes to make the prices more similar to the old ones.

I personally do not mind the credits system, it has its benefits and its drawbacks. But with the Xenforo 2 new ad system (bidding) it would be great if you got more community input from the advertisers and get input from old ex-advertisers to avoid a situation like this again.

All in all, I'm happy with the outcome and having a little discount on the ads for me is great.

 

[Wezel]

pog

 

[Diz]

Howdy everyone, we completely understand everyone’s concerns with the way in which we rolled out this new system and I’ll try to address everything here.

First and foremost, I just want to assure all advertisers that it is always in our best interest to keep you happy with the site and we’ll always try to make the process of buying advertisements on MC-Market fair and easy to understand. We take all input very seriously.

You’re absolutely right in this suggestion and I apologise for the poor implementation of the Credits system for advertisers which I’ll explain later in this post. To remedy this situation, we have made the following changes:

1. Reinstated the previous bulk discounts given on advertisement invoice payments
2. Removed the bulk discounts given on Credit purchases. $1 USD will always be $1 Credit (unless paying with crypto when we’ll still give 5% off)
3. Provided full compensation to all users who have purchased ads in bulk without receiving the discount. Please check your transaction log and if you believe you didn’t receive the appropriate amount please create a ticket.

Recently we went through and made relatively significant reductions in ad prices in an attempt to fix these problems which didn’t work. We won’t be removing these price reductions, and thus almost every advertiser should see a decrease in ad prices. We’ll continue to adjust prices based on supply and demand once everything has settled back to normal in a few weeks.

Where we went wrong
XenForo addons are very difficult to develop, especially on our current version. The implementation of Credits was a deceptively difficult job with all of the fringe cases we had to account for. Credits had been planned, discussed internally, and developed for over 6 months before implementation. During that time we were focusing on the features and functionality and I essentially overlooked the bulk discounts because I assumed that the higher bulk discount tiers were justified by the fact that once you had credits you’d not have to spend them all at once. I didn’t take the time to calculate the influence that this would have on our advertisers and thus we’ve now changed the system to work in a way I’m confident everyone will be happy with.

We tried to remedy this by decreasing the prices of the most expensive sticky thread forums but this didn’t work well either and especially didn’t help smaller advertisers. We’re keeping these price decreases with the changes we’ve made today.

Benefits of the Credits system
Despite everything said above, I still firmly believe that the Credits system is beneficial to both MC-Market and our advertisers, it was purely the bulk discounts that caused problems. The benefits of Credits are as follows.

Support is far easier for us to give. Previously whenever a user was having problems with paying for their invoice due to their card not working properly or when we had to compensate users it was a huge pain in the ass involving coupon codes. Another reason this is easier is when generating invoices for our larger advertisers for tax purposes it’s far better.

Account upgrades are now way better. Previously it was a pretty bad system that was unintuitive for our new users but now it’s easier to use, better for gifting, and especially for our Ultimate users to be able to extend their upgrade while it’s still ongoing.

Full VAT/GST compliance. Through our partnership with FastSpring they provide us with a really simple and secure system of handling our local tax obligations.

More payment methods. Now advertisers can pay with more than just cards and crypto. PayPal, Amazon Pay, GiroPay, WePay, Wire transfer, and even physical cheques are accepted. Basically any way you could want to pay we accept now, reducing friction for advertisers.

The Credits system will be vital for our plans in our XenForo 2 migration because we intend on entirely redeveloping our ads manager from scratch. It’s inevitable that we’ll need Credits anyways, and introducing it on XF1 has allowed us to give all these benefits. Speaking of which, there’s been some concern about our new system because it hasn’t been explained very well, so I’ll explain how our new system will work here:

Explanation of the XF2 system
There’s been some confusion about what the new ads system we’ve alluded to a few times will have in it and some hesitancy with the bidding aspect of it in particular. Our current Ads Manager is an off-the-shelf addon with a handful of custom additions to it, but in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community.

When planning our new system, we saw two fundamental flaws that we knew needed to be fixed; the horrible queue process and ad prices not being balanced well.

The solution to both of these problems (as well as many other minor problems) is to switch from a set price for each forum, category, and position to instead an auction and bidding system. Rather than paying per week, the auctions will be done on a daily basis and ads will display in order of bids. Each auction will have a minimum that you must exceed (a bit below what the stickies currently cost in each forum) and the top 5 bidders will be shown on the site for that day.

Importantly, you don’t need to go back to the auction to re-bid every single day. When you set your bid you can optionally set a budget and your ad will simply keep displaying every day until either your budget is hit, you run out of Credits, you’re banned, or you deactivate your ad.

If you want to sticky a new thread you no longer will have to wait for weeks, months, or even years in some cases for the existing advertisers to hopefully stop paying. You just need to outbid one of the existing advertisers. If you’re outbid your ad will not display until you increase your bid or an advertiser above you reduces their bid.

Another thing we’re particularly excited about in our new system is far more powerful analytics for advertisers. Currently, only banner advertisements can see impressions and clicks, but with our new system, we’ll be bringing this functionality to all forms of advertisements. Now you’ll easily be able to see how effective your sticky thread is through charts of impressions and clicks per day and month.

This new system completely removes the concept of ad invoices entirely since ads will be paid for by deducting Credits from your balance each day automatically rather than a potentially large upfront payment. When we’re on XF2 we’ll switch our discounts back from being given on each invoice to instead being given on Credit purchases just as they previously were (with discounts of up to 40% if buying $7,000+ at a time).

You may be wondering, what happens to my current advertisement I have active when the new system arrives? You’ll receive the full value of any unused time on your ad in the form of Credits and you’ll be able to enter auctions to continue advertising any threads, resources, or banners. For example, if you paid a $100 invoice for 10 weeks of a thread sticky but 5 weeks into it we switch to XF2, you’d receive $50 Credits back in your account.

If anyone has any concerns or questions with this system please let us know. Development for this new system is complete and we’re just putting the final touches on and testing it now but if you have any other concerns it isn’t too late for us to make minor adjustments to the system.

Howdy everyone, we completely understand everyone’s concerns with the way in which we rolled out this new system and I’ll try to address everything here.

First and foremost, I just want to assure all advertisers that it is always in our best interest to keep you happy with the site and we’ll always try to make the process of buying advertisements on MC-Market fair and easy to understand. We take all input very seriously.

You’re absolutely right in this suggestion and I apologise for the poor implementation of the Credits system for advertisers which I’ll explain later in this post. To remedy this situation, we have made the following changes:

1. Reinstated the previous bulk discounts given on advertisement invoice payments
2. Removed the bulk discounts given on Credit purchases. $1 USD will always be $1 Credit (unless paying with crypto when we’ll still give 5% off)
3. Provided full compensation to all users who have purchased ads in bulk without receiving the discount. Please check your transaction log and if you believe you didn’t receive the appropriate amount please create a ticket.

Recently we went through and made relatively significant reductions in ad prices in an attempt to fix these problems which didn’t work. We won’t be removing these price reductions, and thus almost every advertiser should see a decrease in ad prices. We’ll continue to adjust prices based on supply and demand once everything has settled back to normal in a few weeks.

Where we went wrong
XenForo addons are very difficult to develop, especially on our current version. The implementation of Credits was a deceptively difficult job with all of the fringe cases we had to account for. Credits had been planned, discussed internally, and developed for over 6 months before implementation. During that time we were focusing on the features and functionality and I essentially overlooked the bulk discounts because I assumed that the higher bulk discount tiers were justified by the fact that once you had credits you’d not have to spend them all at once. I didn’t take the time to calculate the influence that this would have on our advertisers and thus we’ve now changed the system to work in a way I’m confident everyone will be happy with.

We tried to remedy this by decreasing the prices of the most expensive sticky thread forums but this didn’t work well either and especially didn’t help smaller advertisers. We’re keeping these price decreases with the changes we’ve made today.

Benefits of the Credits system
Despite everything said above, I still firmly believe that the Credits system is beneficial to both MC-Market and our advertisers, it was purely the bulk discounts that caused problems. The benefits of Credits are as follows.

Support is far easier for us to give. Previously whenever a user was having problems with paying for their invoice due to their card not working properly or when we had to compensate users it was a huge pain in the ass involving coupon codes. Another reason this is easier is when generating invoices for our larger advertisers for tax purposes it’s far better.

Account upgrades are now way better. Previously it was a pretty bad system that was unintuitive for our new users but now it’s easier to use, better for gifting, and especially for our Ultimate users to be able to extend their upgrade while it’s still ongoing.

Full VAT/GST compliance. Through our partnership with FastSpring they provide us with a really simple and secure system of handling our local tax obligations.

More payment methods. Now advertisers can pay with more than just cards and crypto. PayPal, Amazon Pay, GiroPay, WePay, Wire transfer, and even physical cheques are accepted. Basically any way you could want to pay we accept now, reducing friction for advertisers.

The Credits system will be vital for our plans in our XenForo 2 migration because we intend on entirely redeveloping our ads manager from scratch. It’s inevitable that we’ll need Credits anyways, and introducing it on XF1 has allowed us to give all these benefits. Speaking of which, there’s been some concern about our new system because it hasn’t been explained very well, so I’ll explain how our new system will work here:

Explanation of the XF2 system
There’s been some confusion about what the new ads system we’ve alluded to a few times will have in it and some hesitancy with the bidding aspect of it in particular. Our current Ads Manager is an off-the-shelf addon with a handful of custom additions to it, but in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community.

When planning our new system, we saw two fundamental flaws that we knew needed to be fixed; the horrible queue process and ad prices not being balanced well.

The solution to both of these problems (as well as many other minor problems) is to switch from a set price for each forum, category, and position to instead an auction and bidding system. Rather than paying per week, the auctions will be done on a daily basis and ads will display in order of bids. Each auction will have a minimum that you must exceed (a bit below what the stickies currently cost in each forum) and the top 5 bidders will be shown on the site for that day.

Importantly, you don’t need to go back to the auction to re-bid every single day. When you set your bid you can optionally set a budget and your ad will simply keep displaying every day until either your budget is hit, you run out of Credits, you’re banned, or you deactivate your ad.

If you want to sticky a new thread you no longer will have to wait for weeks, months, or even years in some cases for the existing advertisers to hopefully stop paying. You just need to outbid one of the existing advertisers. If you’re outbid your ad will not display until you increase your bid or an advertiser above you reduces their bid.

Another thing we’re particularly excited about in our new system is far more powerful analytics for advertisers. Currently, only banner advertisements can see impressions and clicks, but with our new system, we’ll be bringing this functionality to all forms of advertisements. Now you’ll easily be able to see how effective your sticky thread is through charts of impressions and clicks per day and month.

This new system completely removes the concept of ad invoices entirely since ads will be paid for by deducting Credits from your balance each day automatically rather than a potentially large upfront payment. When we’re on XF2 we’ll switch our discounts back from being given on each invoice to instead being given on Credit purchases just as they previously were (with discounts of up to 40% if buying $7,000+ at a time).

You may be wondering, what happens to my current advertisement I have active when the new system arrives? You’ll receive the full value of any unused time on your ad in the form of Credits and you’ll be able to enter auctions to continue advertising any threads, resources, or banners. For example, if you paid a $100 invoice for 10 weeks of a thread sticky but 5 weeks into it we switch to XF2, you’d receive $50 Credits back in your account.

If anyone has any concerns or questions with this system please let us know. Development for this new system is complete and we’re just putting the final touches on and testing it now but if you have any other concerns it isn’t too late for us to make minor adjustments to the system.

Can you offer an explanation as to why MC-Market decided to spend 6 months developing a system no one asked for instead of implementing any of the following?

• Additional payment options for resources IE Tebex BTC Stripe. (The second your Paypal was banned you scrambled to accept btc/card payments for ads why can't we get a similar courtesy?)
• Spend over $0.01 on advertising lord knows you've been so confident with not ever needing to spend money on it looks like it might be time.
• How about actually making it so advertisers can see how many times their ads have been viewed or clicks?
• Maybe we could fix the MCM image loading speed issue and speed all around?
• How about that API, even if its just for ultimate. (Your worthless monthly rank you rushed to market.)

There are plenty more I am sure so I don't know why MC-Market is choosing to do unasked for changes. Are you trying to push the remaining few dedicated users you have left away?

You say this was done because "in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community." but isn't it clear this isn't what the community wants? It's it clear this is just a new way to bring in additional revenue for MC-Market? It has nothing to do with improving the advertising system for the community, don't try and sell that because we aren't buying your shit anymore.

 

[Jayson]

• How about actually making it so advertisers can see how many times their ads have been viewed or clicks?
• Maybe we could fix the MCM image loading speed issue and speed all around?

Hello,

These items fall under what I am doing, so I figured to reply.

Our new advertising system features more detailed statistics for all advertisement types instead of strictly banners, as Mick previously mentioned. These are time-based, so you can see how activity fluctuates throughout the day — or days.

We are actively working on development for our upgrade to XenForo 2, and I can assure you Mick is putting an emphasis on loading speeds for both the attachment (image) system and the forum as a whole. We are investing in more powerful infrastructure, and for static assets, implementing better global edge caching.

By far, we do not expect the transition to be absolutely seamless; however, we are working towards that as a goal. As always, we depend on community suggestions, bug reports, and feature feedback to make agile improvements, and I thank you for participating in that process.

Even so, your main suggestion is now accepted, and I urge you to create separate threads per suggestion instead so that the community can properly discuss your points and give them more attention, increasing the chances of implementation.

Please note that I am for the most part not involved in management decisions extending beyond systems administration and development. Additionally, my views may not accurately reflect those of the MC-Market staff team.

 

[Diz]

Hello,

These items fall under what I am doing, so I figured to reply.

Our new advertising system features more detailed statistics for all advertisement types instead of strictly banners, as Mick previously mentioned. These are time-based, so you can see how activity fluctuates throughout the day — or days.

We are actively working on development for our upgrade to XenForo 2, and I can assure you Mick is putting an emphasis on loading speeds for both the attachment (image) system and the forum as a whole. We are investing in more powerful infrastructure, and for static assets, implementing better global edge caching.

By far, we do not expect the transition to be absolutely seamless; however, we are working towards that as a goal. As always, we depend on community suggestions, bug reports, and feature feedback to make agile improvements, and I thank you for participating in that process.

Even so, your main suggestion is now accepted, and I urge you to create separate threads per suggestion instead so that the community can properly discuss your points and give them more attention, increasing the chances of implementation.

Please note that I am for the most part not involved in management decisions extending beyond systems administration and development. Additionally, my views may not accurately reflect those of the MC-Market staff team.

You didn't need to implement a new system to fix the old one. If anything you should have redesigned the old way from scratch properly. This doesn't offer any explanation as to why a new system was ever considered when it wasn't asked for over countless suggestions that were asked for.

 

[Lone____Wolf]

The new bidding is awesome for people like me who cannot get a sticky since people could infinitely hold an entire section's sticky threads to themselves as long as they kept paying it. (Diz is an example in the Plugins section) Love this update!

 

[Mick]

So, if I understand it correctly... there will be a minimum set price you must pay for sticky (pretty much the same current sticky price) but with an extra option for someone who is crazy enough or a fool to pay an unlimited amount... I suspect the only winner in this situation will be you Mick. This sounds much like those cash-grab "voting sites" with bids up to 10k usd for top spots (Although I cannot deny I am a bit curious to see how it would play out.)

Like it was pointed above, the main problem is that advertising has become unreasonably and, I would say, ridiculously expensive for even less traffic as Dann pointed out.

You Mick claim to care about advertisers but:

- Have you done any market research? Do you have any idea how much money does advertising spots on Mc-Market bring in to advertisers?
- Have you considered how much money does the artist/advertiser has left after paying the expenses (tax and Mc-Market adv. fee)? Or is this question not concerning you?

In the ideal case advertising options should be available to everyone at any time but if you take the man's last shirt for it you cannot claim you care about him...

P.S. I somewhat suspect both of these questons will go unnoticed...

I'm honestly pretty baffled by this perspective on the advertisements that we offer our community. We provide our userbase with a completely free platform to promote their products and services, nobody is forced to buy stickies and users can bump their threads every day manually if that's what they'd prefer. Many of our creators come to MC-Market because they know what a great opportunity it is to start a new business venture or expand an existing company that they operate, and a majority of those never pay a cent for an upgrade or advertisement. Let's say for illustration purposes that just by making a thread for free on MC-Market and bumping it daily you generate $20/week in sales from it.

Alternatively, if a user does want to grow their business more easily or better, they are able to buy an advertisement on the site. If it costs you $5/week for a sticky thread and the sticky alone generates you $150/week in sales, then why should you be able to buy the sticky for such a low price when there would be dozens of other people willing to outbid you for it? Many of our forums have the exact same stickies in them today as they had a year ago because advertisers are simply too scared to stop paying for their slot because they know how long it will take for them to get it back.

Our goal is to reach a perfect balance between the price and availability of advertisements, which is exactly what a bidding system will achieve. Voting sites have bidding systems and it does work exceedingly well for them. I wouldn't call voting sites a cash-grab, they provide a very valuable service to server owners being able to put $10k USD in for a top slot for a return of greater than $10k. If they didn't have a bidding system and instead sold slots for $5/week then one server would inevitably claim the slot and hold it forever because they're able to have such a great return, is that a better system? If it does end up costing you $100/week for a sticky thread slot but that slot directly generates you on average $150/week then would you say no to that $50 in profit that you're generating because you think $100 is too high a price to pay?

Regarding concerns about the starting bids, we’ll most likely be setting them to be very low -- just $0.10 per day in every forum and resource category which is up to 37x cheaper than what our current prices are. Setting them this low is going to be a significant blow for MC-Market’s revenues for the first few weeks or even months after the migration, but I’m confident that with a bidding system our advertisers will be able to bid against each other for a fair price in the end. The starting bids for display banners will be higher but haven’t yet been fully decided so I can’t comment on what those will be just yet.

I personally actually don't mind the auctions - provided the minimum price is far lower than the current pricing (or at least a decent amount lower than the current pricing). At the moment the price for the banner we have has only increased whilst the site traffic has decreased... even with the slight decrease that has been applied just now.

The entire point is to have the price at an equilibrium between supply and demand, which is a good thing.

Although if the base price is going to be the current pricing on ads then it's totally pointless and I see zero reasons as an advertiser to wish to move to the new system, but hey only time will tell.

EDIT:

That being said - It would be nice to see Mick have the auctions based on an eBay style system where you only pay slightly more than the other highest bidder (so say I bid $5/day but the next highest bidder is only $1.50/day, I'd only pay $1.60/day.

The way that we balance ad locations where one person has the location forever is certainly one of the biggest downsides of our current system. We have no way of telling how much an ad generates users so we're left blindly guessing how much each ad location should cost. Every few months (generally around the time of an announcement) we go through all locations and see how many are full. If all 5 are full and there's a queue we assume that demand exceeds supply so we increase the price. If only 1 or 2 are full we'll lower the price to hopefully get people to buy those ads. It's a tricky balancing game at the moment where existing advertisers are frustrated by their slots constantly going up in price and new advertisers are frustrated that they have to wait literally years for a slot in some cases.

I've never used eBay so I'm not too sure how their system works but I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion.

Can you offer an explanation as to why MC-Market decided to spend 6 months developing a system no one asked for instead of implementing any of the following?

• Additional payment options for resources IE Tebex BTC Stripe. (The second your Paypal was banned you scrambled to accept btc/card payments for ads why can't we get a similar courtesy?)
• Spend over $0.01 on advertising lord knows you've been so confident with not ever needing to spend money on it looks like it might be time.
• How about actually making it so advertisers can see how many times their ads have been viewed or clicks?
  Maybe we could fix the MCM image loading speed issue and speed all around?
• How about that API, even if its just for ultimate. (Your worthless monthly rank you rushed to market.)

There are plenty more I am sure so I don't know why MC-Market is choosing to do unasked for changes. Are you trying to push the remaining few dedicated users you have left away?

You say this was done because "in XF2 we’ve developed the system entirely from scratch to best serve the needs of our community." but isn't it clear this isn't what the community wants? It's it clear this is just a new way to bring in additional revenue for MC-Market? It has nothing to do with improving the advertising system for the community, don't try and sell that because we aren't buying your shit anymore.

You didn't need to implement a new system to fix the old one. If anything you should have redesigned the old way from scratch properly. This doesn't offer any explanation as to why a new system was ever considered when it wasn't asked for over countless suggestions that were asked for.

I've been understanding and receptive to everyone's insights into our systems, and yet you seem to be the only person resorting to pathetic personal attacks against me, my girlfriend, and my staff. The examples you gave are each either in development or already planned after the migration. This question has already been answered last time you asked it by Justis:

We’re not putting significant amounts of development time into the current version of our site because all of our XF1 custom developed addons will need to be remade for XF2 which is already heavily under development. Anything we pay to have made for XF1 will end up being unused as soon as XF2 is released. It’d be a waste of money, time and would only delay XF2 further. The reason the things that have been published are related to financials is so that we have the income necessary to fund fast and robust development of all of the features we need re-developed for XF2 along with all of the improvements to the site that have had to be delayed for XF2.

Why would we spend our money advertising MCM when we’re not even where we want to be? Why would we pull resources out of development, push the date when we can release XF2, push the date when we can start paying for development of new features that the community can immediately see?

Doesn’t it make more sense to put a heavy focus on as quickly and efficiently as possible getting everything redeveloped for XF2? So that we’re advertising when we’re where we want to be and when we’re able to provide the desired development time to the production site?

I've been thinking a lot recently about the short, medium, and long-term plans for MC-Market moving forward and am confident that we'll be able to continue growing the site, especially after we migrate and are able to purely focus on new ideas and innovations. For the short term we're working on XF2 but once we're there I'm excited to explain more of our plans in for the medium and long term.

There hasn’t been any more input on this suggestion from advertisers in the past day or two and so I’m confident that we’ve been able to be receptive towards advertisers and fix the poor implementation we had for the Credits system.

Thank you to everyone for your input. If you have any more concerns please let us know through a ticket or another suggestion.

I’ll move this to accepted.